Re: [Pan-users] Request: detachable windows and smart wrapping

[Eric Ortega]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 11:16:24PM +0200, Lauri Alanko wrote:

> Hello.

Hi.


> I have been trying Pan every now and then for over a year now, and
> every time I'm immediately turned off by some glaring interface
> problems, which I've always thought must be so obvious that they'll be
> fixed really soon. Apparently not.

Have you ever been to Graceland?  Probably not, since you appear to
be using a Finnish ISP, but, if you have, you would see that sometimes
people like different things.  Like expensive ceramic monkeys and green
shag carpeting on the walls in their homes.  Different strokes for
different folks.


> The first one: it is silly to constrain the whole application to one
> window, which then can be split to panes in one of a limited number of
> layouts. The group selector, message selector and message view are all
> separate visual components, and there's no reason to put them
> together. Their layout is better left to the window manager, so the
> user can place them as desired. I for one use Ion, which is a
> pane-based window manager, and it is _much_ more user-friendly at
> customizing layouts than Pan is.

First of all, no one is forcing you to use Pan.  It is offered freely, so
your supercilious attitude is guaranteed to effect changes at a much slower
rate than politely asking.

Secondly, the debate between MDI's and the way Pan is currently presented as
being "better" may be a worthy venture, but it assuredly will not get very
far by saying "mine is better, fix it".

Thirdly, you started this whole paragraph with an opinion presented as
a fact.  The way Pan presents itself is not "silly".  You might think it
is, but I don't and there's no way to prove it one way or another.  So
there.  :)

I introduced someone to Pan this very day and they though it was truly
pimp-ass.  No silliness involved.


> So there should definitely be a "separate windows" option, where all
> the three components are given their own X windows.

This might be a nice feature.  


> Another thing. The "wrap" feature seems utterly braindead to me.
> Unless I'm completely mistaken, it uses some heuristic magic to
> partition a message into paragraphs, and then renders those paragraphs
> into lines whose width is predetermined in the preferences as a number
> of characters. I can't see any sensible use for this feature. You just
> switch one fixed width (~80 columns) to another. Proportional fonts
> still look crappy because there's no right justification.

Are you talking about the "wrap" feature when composing messages?  This
feature, AFAICT, wraps badly sized quoted lines properly as well as new
text.

Proportional fonts will look like ass on the usenet no matter what you do.
Don't use them unless you like things that look like ass.


> The way it _should_ go, of course, is to autowrap the message
> according to the current width of the message window. This would make
> proportional fonts much more useful.

But if it were like this, it would not wrap them to how they should
be posted.

I have a Pan session that takes up the entire screen of a 1024x768 desktop
with itty-bitty fonts ... I can fit a lot of characters in there and I
would be ticked if my posts showed up formatted like that.


> And in addition to automagical paragraphization, explicit soft
> newlines as specified by RFC 2646 should probably also be supported.

Feel free to do so.


> Am I the only one who would find these features useful?

Probably, but I wonder if anyone else will get this far in your
suggestions.